Longtime Alaska poet Tom Sexton returns to his mill town roots in a new collection
By Tom Sexton. Loom Press, 2020. 143 pages. $20 “Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems” by Tom Sexton Tom Sexton, a longtime University of Alaska Anchorage professor who retired in 1994 and served as Alaska’s poet laureate from 1995-2000, has returned to his beginnings in Lowell, Massachusetts, in his latest collection, “Cummiskey Alley.” And what a return it is. Sexton, known primarily for his acclaimed work related to Alaska, nature and Chinese poets, here brings his sharp eye and inquiry to the world where he began. “Cummiskey Alley” might be thought of as a memoir in poetry a memoir of the boy and man shaped by a gritty New England mill town, the town as he knew and still knows it, and the history of the place and its working-class citizens. While two-thirds of the poems are gathered from previous collections, among the strongest are new work in which the older Se